It was a classic TV ad from the 1990s about a teenager who wakes up to find his parents' home in a state after a house party, including a nasty scratch on the living room table. He uses the Yellow Pages to find a French polisher before mum and dad return home from holiday.

Its star was Nottingham actor Simon Schatzberger, who went on to play Adrian Mole in the West End. These days he's a stand-up comedian with a show called Woody Allen (ish) that comes to the Glee Club in November.

Here he explains 'How I Became Woody Allen (ish)'

Nottingham actor Simon Schatzberger in the Yellow Pages ad first broadcast in 1991

I was born and raised in Nottingham and moved to London at sixteen when I got the part of Adrian in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ in the West End.

Until the evening show I had most of my days free ('this is a great job', I naively thought) and one afternoon wandered into a cinema double bill that would change my life - Manhattan and Annie Hall.

Simon Schatzberger as Woody Allen (ish)

Who was this little bespectacled man starring in movies he wrote and directed and who was making beautiful women laugh and fall in love with him?

Funnily enough, until that time I had never seen a movie star who I had felt any affinity with, probably due to the fact that the action movie was the dominant genre. Up until this point I had already used humour on pretty much a daily basis to gain classroom popularity and more importantly avoid any physical confrontations that, as the smallest kid in the class, would not end well (luckily, I was also a fast sprinter).

This however, was a whole new world of possibilities…

The annual Woody film release became a huge event for me which I looked forward to with great excitement and expectation – Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours…

Then one birthday my brother bought me Woody Allen’s live stand-up comedy recordings from the sixties (I wasn’t even aware he had been a stand-up comedian), which as well as being hilarious were a revelation, enabling me to retrospectively discover the seeds of what was to become my new found favourite comedy writer, actor and director.

Simon Schatzberger appeared in the play Chicken Soup with Barley at Nottingham Playhouse in 2005

I wore these cassettes out with endless listenings, my brother and I quoting The Moose to each other on almost a daily basis. Rather than hello, we began our phone conversations with “I shot a moose once.”

Cut to: 2015, synching my iTunes and loading up Woody’s live recordings, which I realised I hadn’t actually listened to for some time. This happily coincided with a point in my life when I was seriously toying with the idea of doing stand-up, deliberating on whether to create a character or perform material I had written about me and my life (definitely more than a few Woody-ish moments amongst it all I had to admit).

In a lightbulb moment, as I was listening along and laughing to myself like a strange person driving around, it struck me that I could perform this still amazing material – I knew and loved the routines, I had done more American acting roles than English (Band of Brothers, Neil Simon plays), I was even the same height!

I scoured the vintage shops and found a 1960s Woody-esque all American outfit of Ivy League tweed jacket, thin tie, suede brogues etc. and even a pair of the all important glasses from the same Brooklyn opticians that the man himself has always used. The look was complete, now I just had to spend many (many) hours learning not only the words, but his intonations, speech patterns and physicality from the recordings and any footage I could find, including an appearance he had been flown in to record at Granada in Manchester in 1965 whilst filming “What’s New Pussycat” in Europe.

In a development that Woody himself would surely approve of, the Rabbi at a London Synagogue booked me for my first gig, asking for half an hour’s worth of material to a hall full of over one hundred people. I could hardly refuse a Rabbi!.

As it turned out it was a wonderful evening and it was incredible bringing to life the routines that I and many of the audience members had known and loved for years. It actually felt like I had been performing them for all of those years.

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Now, after two years of sell-out and fantastically received shows at the Edinburgh Festival, London, along with shows in London, Comedy Festivals up and down the country and even a gig in Sweden (Woody is big in Scandanavia), my dream is that Woody himself will be in town, see the show and tell me afterwards that “I do him nearly as well as he does” and book me to play the lead in his next movie.

Then, in true Woody fashion, I get insecure and worry he’ll just call his lawyers. At least that would be great publicity…